Whether you are just starting a business or have been at it for many years, chances are you need to learn some kick-start lessons either to get you going in the first place or to re-vitalise your company that is, perhaps, becoming stale. Here’s what I did recently –

As you will know if you follow me, my partner, Tina, left the practice at the end of October 2014 and took just about all of our clients with her. Those that she didn’t take in October, she gradually managed to extract over the next few months. She was, after all, the operations side of the practice and had most of the client contact, so it wasn’t difficult. This left me in a bit of a pickle. All I had was the new business that I generated from sale of shelf companies and trusts.

The problem was that a shelf company sells for about R2 000 and a trust for about R4 000. Although we offer add-on services, it was proving impossible to get the turnover up to the R250 000 pm that I’d set as my target.

What to do? I needed a substantial product that talked real numbers, but I was not prepared to get back into auditing (can you imagine an engineer enjoying auditing, even though I am also a CA(SA)?).

One Monday morning at 05h30 at the end of November, I sat in a quiet spare room, darkened the blinds and focussed my awareness inwards. Once I was in the right frame of mind (I’ve been practicing this technique for over 40 years), I imagined a pschologist sitting behind me. I told him my problem and asked for his help. He pointed out that I had many skills accumulated over years of business, study and thinking. Surely, I could put together a package that was saleable? But then how would I get new clients to take the leap of faith and commit to what could amount to R6 000 to R12 000 per month? We figured that if I could start them off committing to only R2000 per month for two months, I could use those two months to prove to them that I could add far more value and cash flow than my charges. So then I would add more services and increase the commitment to, say R4000 for another four months and so on until they reached their logical plateau.

And so Dream Maker was born. It includes budgeting, marketing, cash control, bookkeeping, payroll, but especially invigorating the entrepreneur to keep thinking up new ideas to improve his/her business, ultimately with mind power training and “Dreaming Dreams” – exactly the techniques that I used to come up with the idea in the first place.

Here it is –

Of course it is flexible depending upon the particular client.

What I want to get across to you is that this entire concept was created in one 1/2 hour session with my imaginary psychologist and then polished on the way to work the same morning.

You can do the same for your business. You just have to decide to break out!

Book a meeting, come and see me. Maybe sign up for Dream Maker yourself. Check out the blue section above. You won’t recognise yourself after two months.